New Haven, Connecticut - Yale Law School scholar Dr. Helyeh Doutaghi has been fired in the latest attack on pro-Palestine members of university campus communities.

"On Friday, March 28th, Al-Quds Day, just days before we, as Muslims, marked our second Eid under the shadow of a continuing genocide against our families in Palestine, Yale Law School (YLS) terminated my employment for speaking out against the Zionist barbarity in Palestine," Doutaghi, deputy director of the Law and Political Economy Project at Yale, shared in a statement on social media.

"What we are witnessing at institutions like Yale, Cornell, Columbia, and Harvard is the normalization of fascistic governance. From the kidnapping of students and scholars for exercising their free speech rights to criminalizing, doxxing, suspensions, and institutional gag orders now commonplace on campuses, universities have become active collaborators in silencing dissent and criminalizing resistance," the Iranian legal studies scholar continued.

"Functioning as effective sites of surveillance and oppression, these institutions – in collaboration with the repressive state apparatus – are setting new and dangerous precedents for rules of engagement across the country."

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Doutaghi's firing came after she was placed on administrative leave last month over alleged ties to Samidoun: the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, which the US has designated a terrorist-linked group. She has denied any unlawful connection to the group, and said she did not get a hearing before her contract was abruptly terminated.

Doutaghi has rejected Yale's claims that she was unwilling to meet or respond to the allegations, saying she repeatedly indicated her readiness to answer questions in writing.

Doutaghi's attorney, Eric Lee, said he received an email from Yale's office of general counsel on March 3 indicating the scholar was under investigation based on allegations in a Jewish Onliner article.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz identified Jewish Onliner as an AI-generated bot – with possible ties to the Israeli government and military – targeting pro-Palestinian speech.

"This sets a chilling precedent," Doutaghi wrote. "If any Al bot – or anyone at all – accuses a Yale faculty or student of wrongdoing, that alone can now suffice to end their career. This is the state of the US legal academy today: where due process and the rule of law are taught in classrooms but abandoned in practice."

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Doutaghi connected her firing with the Trump administration's escalated attacks on noncitizen students and faculty taking a stand for Palestinian human rights, as well as with the US' broader geopolitical standing.

"This is a pivotal moment in history and in the decline of the American empire," she said in her statement. "The US regime is coordinating violent repression of the domestic front with an escalation of war on the external front."

"What we are witnessing unfold in the United States is not the failure of democracy – this is Western liberal democracy itself. A system built to serve capitalist property. A system born in genocide and enslavement, whose objective has always been, in the first and last instance, the 'freedom' of propertied classes to accumulate wealth through the denial of freedom and sovereignty to the colonized."